The present invention relates generally to management of data storage resources. More particularly, the invention relates to techniques for monitoring data storage resources in order to allow a user or operator to determine when additional resources are likely to be needed.
Many business transactions and other transactions having legal effect, such as those related to mortgages and mortgage insurance, involve the creation and management of documents. The usefulness of many such documents, such as promissory notes, sales contracts, loan applications and title encumbrances such as mortgages and deeds of trust, does not depend solely on the information contained therein, but on the function of the documents as memorials of legal transactions. Because they include such indicia of execution as signatures and notarizations of signatures, many documents must be stored in the form of paper records or images of paper records.
For example, a mortgage insurance application or policy may include text information that can be stored in files of relatively small size. Associated with this text information, however, will be supporting documents, such as signed applications and contracts, title deeds, deeds of trust and title records including records of various transactions affecting the title of a subject property. Such supporting documents may be stored most conveniently as captured images or as paper documents. Captured images are typically stored as graphic files and are relatively large. Even in cases where actual paper documents are stored, captured images of the documents will suitably be stored as captured images associated with text files in order to provide easy access to such documents for review. Text files containing transaction information, along with graphic files containing images of supporting documents, are preferably stored on a storage medium such as an optical storage medium providing a high capacity archival storage capability.
A large mortgage insurance processing center may manage many hundreds or thousands of application and policy documents, so that volumes of storage media may need to be removed and replaced with blank volumes at frequent intervals. The length of the intervals between replacement of media volumes will typically depend on how rapidly each volume is filled.
Alerting a user or operator only when a volume has been filled and must be replaced is inconvenient and reduces operating efficiency, because by that time the volume is unavailable for writing of new information. Writing of new information must be delayed until the filled volume has been replaced and a new volume is available for writing. Replacing volumes at fixed intervals may waste operator time or available media space if volumes are replaced while they still have significant space available. Greater efficiency in use of time and resources, and in availability of volumes for writing, would be achieved if the information about the usage of storage media and the remaining capacity available on the storage media could be provided to the user and the operator on an ongoing basis.
There exists, therefore, a need for a monitoring system for providing a user and an operator with information relating to the ongoing use, and trends in use, of media in a data storage and retrieval system.